


The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove

by allthingsunrelated



Category: Gangsta. (Manga)
Genre: American Sign Language, Child Abuse, Drabble, Friendship, Gen, Graphic Description, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Platonic Relationships, Squick, flows with canon, kinda??, low-key ship, nonsensical language, wallace-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 10:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4388222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsunrelated/pseuds/allthingsunrelated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Wallace humors the idea: Could he completely understand the complex thoughts inside that kid's brain?<br/>Relate to that mass of tissue, literally within arm's reach, behind only millimeters of skin and skull.</p><p>Definitely not. --And Wallace can admit to this, because he has no shame as a soft, privileged young man who's greatest threat in life was falling down the stairs, probably.<br/>If that's what you want to call it.<br/>It could certainly kill you on a bad day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Kohske, thank you for fucking ruining my life. Thank you.

 

 

Wallace hides himself in the library, sheltered by the rows and rows of shelves solid with literature about any subject you could possibly imagine. It was a grand room, a sanctuary of knowledge and silence that Wallace found himself in, constantly returning to smell the printed paper lined with dust and dry-rotting leather.

He spent so many hours there that it was avoided by the maids working in the Arcangelo mansion because of his bitterly superior attitude, and Wallace was perfectly content with that.

If he wanted something bad enough, he could find ways to obtain it.

In his grasp was the hard cover book he and Nic had been studying, the one that was almost eviscerated.

Wallace reads through it again, even if it's committed to memory and each time he holds the book in his hands, his fingers are smeared with ash.

The communication barrier between Nicolas and himself was being chipped away, like old paint peeling and revealing a different shade underneath. It was a challenge Wallace was prepared to overcome, just because there was something about Nicolas that drove him forward.

Something he wanted to protect.

Because Wallace would want to be protected.

An oversized encyclopedia protruding from the bookshelf gouges into his back. Wallace doesn't care enough to move lest his headache intensify so he remains sedentary.

He has no way of knowing how ugly his face must look but from the swelling accompanied by the throbbing he can _feel in his fucking teeth_ , its probably a real shiner.

He hears the chime of dog tags. Nic's shoes scuff on the carpet, too tired to pick up his feet and he sinks down to the floor with his sword in his lap across from Wallace, who upon his arrival set the book face-down between them.

Nicolas looks disheveled, but that's nothing new. The unsightly cast that was on his arm was removed at last, or Nic remedied that himself.

He has the outdoors air still lingering on his person, Wallace can smell the earthiness of it. Old adhesive bandages on his forehead have began to curl away from sweat.

"Hey."

"e **Y**."

Wallace cups his hands together, fingers touching to create an arch and rolls them forward, gesturing at Nic with a half-cocked eyebrow.

_(How are you?)_

"...Well?"

He notices Nic's eyes travel from his mouth to his puffy cheek from when he fell flat into the back of his father's hand.

He swivels his face away and produces a pack of cigarettes from inside his blazer. Of course he wasn't _supposed_ to be smoking indoors, well smoking _at all_ \- but Wallace is a kid brimming with highly concentrated passive-aggression, so just fucking try him.

"w- **E** n."

"...When what?" Wallace doesn't look directly at him, but Nic can read him.

Sighing audibly, Nicolas orbits his open palm around his own face once and then points at Wallace.

He subconsciously touches the bruise before he lights his cigarette.

Wallace flicks his right wrist towards his shoulder and then rests his left hand on his right arm with a pinched expression.

_(Before sunrise)_

"- **Ur** t?" Nicolas asked accompanied with two inward jabs of his index fingers.

Sure it hurt. Wallace wasn't sure if he wanted to admit it, but it always hurt.

"Its fine. It doesn't hurt." Wallace shook his head, crinkling soft paper and cellophane in his hand.

"You know how clumsy I am. Almost as clumsy as you are." He added.

Nicolas pursed his lips, the thin skin under his eyes gleaming from the window's light and appeared a deceivingly slick, sickly aubergine tinged.

He didn't know at what stage in their friendship he would be able to explain to Nicolas how his father could devastate him without lifting a hand, but it always escalated to violence.

Then again, Wallace probably wouldn't need to open his mouth for Nic to understand.

 

In the evenings it was always worse, the atmosphere changed and the stress of a day coiled in his spine when Nic retired for the night.

It was then Wallace wished he wasn't alone.

The wine served at the main dinning room -which he studied in passing but never attended- always disappeared with his father and Wallace would duck his way through the mansion like a thief, which is what he felt like.

Somehow, he had disgraced his father and stole something from him, something so precious that he was punished for existing.

Wallace's ritual for coping was gently peeling his shirt off to accommodate the tenderness of soft tissue damage, brushing glass out of his hair and hoping the next day would be different.

Which he supposes isn't really coping. Maybe pretending would be a more fitting word.

 

It leaves an unpleasant taste in his mouth the poison of cigarettes cannot mask.

Wallace takes a long drag and exhales a great plume of smoke that Nicolas leans away from.

"Eventually..." Wallace watches the smoke ribbons drift up towards the ceiling and diffuse in the air. " We'll learn to pick up our feet when we walk."

He punctuates the end of his sentence with a breathy and broken laugh while he squirms a bit to move away from the encyclopedia sticking into his spine.

His headache has ebbed a bit. Wallace ashes into the cuff of his pants leg, glancing at Nic who's attention has been deviated by a bird's movement outside the window.

He closes his eyes and in that moment finds he's never been more pleased to be in Nic's company, briefly wondering if the feeling is mutual.

It was simple to underestimate Nicolas. Small, fragile looking kid with bony shoulders sloping and defeated, bones broken and fused, skin torn apart and sewn together, over and over.

Sometimes Wallace humors the idea: Could he completely understand the complex thoughts inside that kid's brain?

 _Relate_ to that mass of tissue, literally within arm's reach, behind only millimeters of skin and skull.

Definitely not. --And Wallace can admit to this, because he has no shame as a soft, privileged young man who's greatest threat in life was falling down the stairs, probably.

If that's what you want to call it.

It could certainly kill you on a bad day.

Though Nicolas was tough like tempered and reinforced glass, he still breaks and bleeds like a human though, so to Wallace that was all the evidence he needed.

He was a Twilight, sure.

But he is not a monster.

When he forces his eyelids open, Nic is there in front of him, with his right hand snared around Wallace's left ear rather roughly.

"Umm...Nic?"

He felt two fingers push against the mass and slide up his cheek bone.

Remembering that he had to keep up appearances, Wallace tried not to let the pain show but a single tear betrayed him and collected where Nic's fingers recessed against his cheek.

Wallace cut his eyes at Nic, who wore a saints expression while he judged the severity of the bruise for himself.

"See? Not a big deal." Wallace gritted out, wrenching away from Nicolas's hands and wiping his face on his jacket sleeve.

Nicolas slumps back onto his heels, his eyes looking exceptionally flat and unconvinced.

 

The next morning Nicolas waited outside Wallace's bedroom door for him as per usual. He rocked on his heels, twisting the fabric of his shirt until the sunlight painting the wall across from him slowly slid down and merged with the floor.

He rapped his knuckles on the door frame.

Again, with a little more force behind it. Just to be sure.

Since the door hadn't opened, Nic turned the knob and craned his neck to peek through the sliver, to which he found Wallace's room vacant.

 

Wallace has a distinct smell, its not something you could label beyond just an individuals body chemistry, but it's his own, unique.

Nic follows it down the long hall lined with paned windows, dust floating in the sunlight like molecules in solution, dancing and swirling past him as he walks.

Around the next corner Nicolas is slammed by the intensity of stale cigarette smoke and wet metal.

Wallace is there, slouched against the corridor wall. He doesn't look at Nic as he approaches but he draws his legs up and out of his path and Nic hunkers down across from him.

He was caught smoking is what Nicolas reads, and if gets caught again he'll probably be killed. Wallace forces a faint smile while he forms those words, like he's only been merely inconvenienced by the beating he sustained.

The fool lights another cigarette, the pungent odor swallows them up but its not strong enough to pollute the heavy smell of sweet iron and alcohol sticking like cotton in his sinuses.

Wallace exhales, and a fresh trickle of blood dribbles from his nose and drips from his lip onto his exposed collar bone. His clothes are wrinkled, his tie is loose and a button is missing from his shirt from being jarred.

He looks exhausted, his face a collage of bruises and broken skin. There is blood smeared on his face and soaked into strands of his hair.

This is the most severely Nicolas has seen Wallace beaten, and it stirs some obscure emotion inside the hollow of his chest and his diaphragm contracts like its going to force his guts into his throat.

Wallace's lips are moving again. He asks how things are with his new guild. Nicolas glances at the stray button idle on the floor before returning to Wallace. The cuts and abrasions on Nic's hands are pretty deep and a ugly red. His fingers twitch.

"...I see..." He sighs, arching his neck to gaze up at the ceiling while nursing his cigarette.

He's gotten really good as deciphering Nic's array of meaningful blank stares.

"...Its funny... How nothing has changed at all." Wallace works out, swallowing a backflow of blood from his sinuses and something that feels akin to genuine sadness. He clears his lungs.

His entire body is flimsy and he can't feel his fucking face anymore. Which is sort of a win, for now, until the numbness wears off and his head begins to rupture from the inside out.

He cradles his forehead in his arms, cigarette glued to his lip.

"Seriously, I'm worn out." He breathes, but doesn't sound serious enough to even convince himself.

_Why do you put up with it?_

_Why don't you just run away?_

He hears Nicolas's clothing rustle.

"...LL...?"

And Wallace looks up at those lacerated, ruddy and irritated hands, forming an eerily familiar sign and the fuzzy dilation of his pupils reel into constriction.

_'Should I kill them?'_

Nicolas's proposal is a wave of adrenaline that courses Wallace's nerves, like red hot nails burning into every inch of his skin and it turns to goose flesh.

The idea is traumatizing before its ever tantalizing and it sits on his spine like hard drugs. Nausea pulls on his tongue while he rolls the idea around in his head, absorbing the words again and again until its considered secondary poisoning.

He doesn't know what to say in response to something so heedless. Its so absurd, its almost amusing. Almost.

Is it even a yes or no answer?

He blinks, eyes flickering to Nicolas's face. He appears calm, collected. Wallace doesn't underestimate that sad empty stare, dark corneas floating in sclera. All the vibrancy and color bled out of them and stained under his eyes. Wallace's pulse increases, and the surge of pressure has brought unwanted sensitivity back into his head.

_There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so; *_

Wallace smears the blood from his nose onto his wrist cuff, but another relentless line weeps down the slope of his lips. His cigarette had long since extinguished itself and so Wallace flicks the filter down the hall.

Lifting his hand, Wallace touches his fingers to his forehead and pulls it away close-fisted, except for his thumb and pinky. He gives the only fathomable answer that is coincidentally a question.

 _'Why?'_  

Nicolas's response was kneecaps and shifting cartilage on hard flooring. Dark hair brushes overtop Wallace's eyelids, followed by two seconds of overt pressure on busted lips over aching teeth, disorganizing the numbness pooling under his skin and integrating into nerves.

_Either was the other's mine. *_

Wallace is left with the bitter taste of psychoactive drugs and likewise, Nicolas wears Arcangelo blood.

 

Nicolas has never been one to mince his words.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> * referenced from The Tragedy of Hamlet  
> * referenced from The Phoenix and the Turtle
> 
> And thank you readers, I hope you feel as miserable as I do.


End file.
